CHAPTER 7

Customer Messaging

You’ve got eight seconds and 31 words to grab the buyer’s attention! You have 10 minutes—at most—to make your best case.

We live in an ADD chaotic world. We get news in sound bites, consume fast food, and read book summaries. We fly coast-to-coast at 500 miles per hour, communicate globally in real time, and run the mile in three minutes and forty-three seconds. We text and drive, gas and go, and eat on the run. We do everything fast. We are a distracted and hyperactive culture.

These distractions cost U.S. businesses a whopping $650 billion annually in lost productivity. People experience 56 interruptions per day, spend 28 percent of their days dealing with these interruptions, switch activities every three minutes, and face a minimum 600 marketing exposures every day.¹ The noise level in the buyer’s head is deafening. All of that is your competition.

Marketing is more than a department; it’s every way you communicate with your customers. It includes brochures, ads, websites, trade-show booths, journal articles, social media presence, how your folks answer phones, how your drivers drive (especially if your name and logo are on the company vehicle), the look of your proposals, your packaging, the look of your invoices, point-of-sale pieces, and so on.

This chapter is about your communications with customers. It’s about how you shape your message for specific customers, the documentation you need to support this message, and the campaign you design to surround customers with your value story.

At the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

•   Define customer messaging

•   Discuss why it’s important to launch a customer messaging campaign

•   Identify and list your value added

•   Design collateral support materials to communicate your value

•   Communicate your value through social media

•   Incorporate the buyer’s pain proposition into your messaging

WHAT IS CUSTOMER MESSAGING

Customer messaging is the ongoing conversation you have with your customers. It’s the what and how you communicate. Customer messaging is the marketing side of sales. It is your planned communications campaign. Controlling these conversations for customer interface is vital to your marketing and sales efforts. A breakdown in communications confuses and frustrates customers. Consistency is key. It’s imperative that everyone involved in customer communications understands and communicates the same message.

Your marketing department could spend millions of dollars to position a brand, and with a single confused sales presentation or imprudent discount, you negate that branding effort. Customer messaging must be strategic and coordinated. When it is properly designed and executed, this campaign preps the battlefield of the customer’s mind for your sales efforts.

Using the ideas in this chapter will result in message clarity, congruence, and synergy. The focus will be tactical (field level), customer-centric message campaigns. Ongoing, multiple exposures make up your campaign. The outcome of these planned and managed conversations is to surround customers with compelling messages of value.

Once you’re clear on the value-added messages you want customers to hear, you can take these messages to the market. How you broadcast these messages is limited only by the edge of your imagination. Here are some examples of how companies surround customers with their messages of value: printed messages on invoices, recorded phone messages, web-based communications, trade journal ads, customer bills of rights, awards brochures, shipping documentation, e-mail blitzes, case studies, value worksheets, and sharing social media content. To begin your campaign, you must be clear on your value added.

VALUE ADDED

Let’s begin with a definition of value added. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, value added is the difference between raw material input and finished product output.² On a practical level, it’s everything you do to something from the moment you buy it, sell it, and service it. Value added is both quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative value added is easy to sink your teeth into and to get your arms around. It’s visible, tangible, observable, measurable, objective, quantifiable, substantive, and performance based. It stands on its own merits. You can attach a dollar value to it.

It’s what you do for the customer. It includes cost containment, increased market share, greater efficiency, and competitive gain. Your toll-free phone number, personalized delivery, customer training programs, extended warranty, replacement parts, and 24-hour maintenance have quantifiable gain for the buyer. Quantitative value makes it easier to sell your solution.

Qualitative value added is more difficult to get your arms around. Compared with quantitative value added, it’s more subjective and intangible—not easily measured. It offers more style than substance, perceived and felt, but not quite as objective. Some people call it soft-dollar value because it makes the buyer feel good about your product, your company, and you. It’s more of who you are than what you do.

Qualitative value added describes the number of locations and the facilities available to the buyer, the management philosophy of your company, the goodwill you’ve created with customers, the product’s brand name, your company’s reputation, your company’s depth and breadth of resources, the number of years your company has been in business, your knowledge as a salesperson, and how your stuff looks when it arrives.

While quantitative value added stands on its own merits, qualitative value added implies a benefit. Qualitative value added produces a warm and fuzzy feeling for buyers. They view qualitative value added as a security blanket or cushion. It enables them to get a good night’s sleep. What’s that worth? Customers know it’s important, but they may find it difficult to nail down. To paraphrase a customer’s quote in our survey, it is the look and feel of things. Qualitative value gets people excited about your solution; it builds expectations. Quantitative value satisfies the customer’s more tangible needs; it performs for the customer.

Your Value Audit

One method for determining your value added is to study all three dimensions of value: your product, your company, and you. First, in addition to its perceived value, what is your product’s impact value on the customer? Identify the impact of your value by considering how your product enhances or improves the following for the customer: profitability, operational efficiency, productivity, performance, quality, safety, ease of use, waste reduction, uptime, durability, consistency, reliability, operating costs, warranty, serviceability, convenience, compliance to specifications, and timeliness, to name a few.

How does your product add value to your customer’s product? Does this product synergy increase competitiveness, attractiveness, and end-user acceptance? How do customers perceive your product, as an investment or an expense? Our BSP results tell us that the product is 57 percent of the reason why buyers choose an alternative.

Second, separate from the product dimension, what value added does your company offer the customer? Make a list of the value added your company provides. This list contains both quantitative and qualitative value added. It includes literature, reputation, industry leadership, facilities, technical support, location, systems, depth and breadth of inventory levels, shipping policies, ordering options, ease of doing business, distribution channels, field support, online support, electronic commerce, free delivery, hours of operation, customer loyalty programs, disposal, trade-in policy, and so on.

Third, the next dimension of value is you—what you do for the customer. The easiest way for you to arrive at your value added is to refer to the Value-Added Selling Process explained in Chapter 5 and determine how you add value at each step along the path.

In the Presale Planning stage, for instance, you may add value by conducting an in-depth needs analysis, providing a live demonstration of your product, studying the buyer’s needs and brainstorming a solution, locating hard-to-find items for the buyer, and submitting a professional proposal.

In the Acquisition/Transition stage, you may add value by assuring smooth, painless, and seamless transitions to your product. Your value-added activities could include confirming order status, expediting, tracking back orders, providing training for employees, following the supply chain, and helping with credits and returns.

In the Postsale Usage stage, you add value by following up to assure maximum performance and economy from your product. This postsale support, coupled with helping customers’ businesses grow, will differentiate you from all other salespeople with whom your customers meet. Present this chronology of value added as an example of how your support parallels customers’ needs.

A second method for determining your value added is illustrated in the above example. Study your solution from the customer’s Critical Buying Path. How does your solution (all three dimensions of value) support the customer and add value at every step along the way?

A third method for determining your value added is a freestyle brainstorming exercise. To begin this exercise, make a list of all the value added you offer your customer. Write down as many as you can think of. Go for quantity. You can always revise and edit. This includes the quantitative (what you do for customers) and qualitative value (who you are). Seek input from different disciplines in your company. Each discipline and employee brings a unique source of value to the customer. You can include your customers in this exercise too. Survey them to determine which value-added services contribute the most to their bottom lines. You may find some surprises here. This menu of value added describes a feast for the buyer.

CUSTOMER MESSAGING TOOLS

There are a number of tools that you can use to surround the customer with your message of value. The following list contains some of the more common ways we have seen salespeople and their companies communicate their value to customers. Your company’s website plays a major role in communicating value. There is an entire discipline in marketing today that is dedicated to analyzing the content of your communications. Sales and marketing must work together to create the most relevant information customers want and the most powerful messages to communicate your value-added position in the marketplace. Here are some examples to use in your messaging campaign.

The VIP List

The primary use of this information from your value audit is to construct a VIP (value in purchasing) list. The VIP list is made up of all the information from the previous exercises. It is the fundamental selling tool for value-added salespeople and your first customer messaging tool. The VIP list is a menu of your value, an inventory of what makes you special, and a portfolio of assets. Think about that last word—assets. Isn’t that what partners bring to relationships?

You use this list to communicate your total value to the buyer. You could turn this compilation into a brochure, a handout on your company letterhead, a website page, a sheet in your proposals, or a collateral literature piece to combat price objections.

One salesperson uses this list as a supplier performance appraisal. Twice a year, he audits his company’s performance against the VIP list to ensure that the customer receives all the value on the back end that he promised on the front end.

Another salesperson gives the VIP list to his buyer to use as an internal sales piece to sell others in the buyer’s company on the salesperson’s value added. He had discovered that his internal champion did a better job of selling for him when armed with a support piece explaining his company’s value added.

One salesperson conducted a value audit and presented his findings as a list of 30 value-added extras to her best customers. She asked these loyal customers, “Which of these are most important to you?” She then trimmed the list to 10 and it became her VIP list. When attracting new customers that look a lot like her existing customers, this list comes in handy for communicating her value. It’s already been field tested by her best customers.

Managers can use this VIP list as a training tool. One of our clients conducts a VIP list exercise every January to ensure his sales force understands the depth and breadth of his company’s value added. He begins with a blank flipchart page, and his salespeople fill that page and several others with examples of their value added during the sales meeting. This is one way to keep his salespeople focused on their total solution. Also, it’s a great tool to use with new hires to cut their learning curve for the company’s value-added solution and to brace them for handling price resistance. The only limitation to your using the VIP list is the edge of your imagination. There are as many ways to use this list as there are salespeople.

The Elevator Speech

The elevator speech has been around for so long in sales that it is largely attributed to Anonymous. Salespeople have used this simple messaging technique to get appointments, networking events, website content, getting past gatekeepers, and opening sales conversations with customers. Like the VIP list, the only thing that limits your use is the edge of your imagination.

There are varying opinions of what makes up an elevator speech, and we prefer a simple format that meets our criteria for 31 words or less. You want this to be a quick attention-getter. Anything that is too long loses the buyer’s attention. In as few words as possible, answer these three questions:

•   Who are we?

•   What do we do?

•   To whom do we sell?

Here are a couple of examples.

Franklin Scientific is a full-line distributor of laboratory supplies and equipment. The primary markets we serve are universities, biotech, clinical labs, pharmaceutical, R&D, and government laboratories. (26 words)

Tom Reilly Training specializes in teaching salespeople and their managers how to compete aggressively and profitably based on their total value, not price. (23 words)

In both cases, these elevator speeches would encourage the buyer to ask, “How?” That’s the point. They are interest-generating, simple explanations of what companies do. Now, compare that with this elevator speech.

Hays technology is a global partner in the content-analysis industry offering analytics in a cohesive and integrated methodology to maximize innovative design parameters that produce valuable outcomes for our client partners that seek to understand the clickstream activity of online buyers of multiple applied technologies. We know that in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they are not, so we pursue pragmatic adaptations of complex data sets and simplify them into simple and coherent solutions. (79 words)

Huh? The really sad part is that someone in marketing communications must approve of something like this. Remember, humans are wired for simplicity.

The Customer Bill of Rights

The third customer messaging tool is the customer bill of rights. This is the experience you plan to deliver to your customers and an important part of your messaging campaign. It’s the promise you make, your covenant with customers. Promises influence expectations. Customer expectations play a major role in customer satisfaction.

All employees must be clear on these promises since they help create customer expectations. How your employees deliver on these expectations affect customer satisfaction. Having a clear standard for serving customers and communicating its importance internally is the first step in this process. You can create this with a customer bill of rights. The customer bill of rights answers this question: What six things do our customers have a right to expect when doing business with our company?

Here is a sample bill of rights constructed by the employees of a small manufacturing company in Southeast Missouri.

Unique Selling Proposition

The fourth customer messaging tool is the unique selling proposition (USP). The history of the USP goes back to World War II America. An advertising agency in New York City coined the expression. The USP also has been referred to as the Big Idea. It is the one thing that you can lay claim to that no one else in the market or industry can say. The USP is your bragging rights. What is different about your customer experience from the rest of the market? It is the outstanding difference that makes you stand out in your market. This difference must be unique, specific, compelling, and defendable by you. The clearer your USP, the easier it is for the buyer to see the difference between you and the competition. Answering these questions will help you to determine your USP:

•   We were the first to . . .

•   We are the only ones that . . .

•   Customers tell us we’re unique because . . .

Value Proposition

The fifth customer messaging tool is the value proposition. After conducting a value audit and listing your value added, creating a customer bill of rights, and studying your uniqueness, you are probably developing a sense of pride and clarity of the full impact you have on the customer’s world. This impact or downline outcome of your customer experience is your value proposition. It’s the long-range impact of your value-added solution on the customer. It is a clear statement of the tangible results customers experience as a consequence of partnering with you. It is the end result of the customer’s using all of the value added on your VIP list, enjoying the experience outlined on the customer bill of rights, and appreciating your uniqueness. Getting the value proposition right and communicating it clearly to customers is the number one goal for customer messaging. Our internal research shows that only 46 percent of salespeople understand clearly their value proposition.

Do you know the full impact of your value added on the customer? These are some examples of value propositions. The timeline implicit in each of these demonstrates downline value:

•   Helping customers play bigger than they are

•   Helping customers better serve and satisfy their customers

•   Helping customers achieve economic gain (greater profitability)

•   Giving customers access to global markets

•   Helping customers differentiate themselves in their markets

•   Helping customers excel at what they do

•   Enhancing their purchasing power

•   Adding value to the quality of the customer’s product

The first step in constructing your value proposition is to identify the different segments you serve. You cannot be all things to all people. Those suppliers that try end up being nothing special to anyone.

Companies segment customers using different parameters depending on their purposes: demographics, psychographics, geographic location, and even SIC classification. For our purposes in customer messaging, we define a segment as a group of customers with similar needs—either complex or simple. Customers with simple needs expect little more than price and availability from suppliers. Customers with complex needs demand greater value added from their suppliers. Our use of the value proposition even includes different levels of decision makers in an organization. One level of decision maker may define a successful outcome in logistics terms, while another may define success as a product that is easier for salespeople to sell. The tighter your definition of the buyer segment to whom you’re selling, the more compelling your value proposition.

Though value propositions identify customer segments, they also describe specific opportunities you pursue. Value propositions are marketing tools that salespeople use tactically. Your value proposition varies by segment, customer, and opportunity. As you will read in Chapters 9 and 27, value propositions vary by level of decision maker. Purchasing may seek a value proposition that reflects logistics concerns. Operations may seek a value proposition that reflects manufacturing ease. Sales and marketing may want a value proposition that makes it easier to take their product to market. Value propositions are as broad as market segments and as specific as individuals.

Once you’ve clarified your value proposition, prepare a formal statement to use in your customer messaging campaign: sales letters, proposals, social media, sales presentations, and elevator speeches, to name a few.

The One-Sheet

One-sheets are popular in the arts and entertainment world. They are exactly what they sound like—one sheet that describes your offering in enough detail to capture attention and stir interest in the offering. This tool makes sense for salespeople that operate in a world where buyers are inundated with information. One-sheets are clear and concise. They provide a simple format to use many of the tools you have already created.

•   The Elevator Speech

– Who are we?

– What do we do?

– To whom do we sell?

•   Ten value-added talking points from the value audit:

– Three company examples of value added

– Three product examples of value added

– Three salesperson examples of value added

– Your unique selling proposition

•   Summary statement: value proposition

You can customize the one-sheet for a market segment, a specific account, or even a specific level of decision maker. The value audit list summarizes your value added along the three dimensions while offering an opportunity to reinforce your unique selling proposition. The value proposition, as the summary statement, encapsulates what makes your solution valuable to the customer. Figure 7.1 is an example of a one-sheet that we use in our seminars to illustrate the concept.

FIGURE 7.1 Sample One-Sheet

LAUNCHING YOUR CUSTOMER MESSAGING CAMPAIGN

The key word in this heading is campaign. This ongoing effort seeks to prepare the buyer’s mind to choose your value-added solution. This is not a single event or act. Your goal is to surround prospects and customers with the message that your solution is the solution they must own. Campaign, ongoing, and surround sound very much like a continuous wearing down of the walls of resistance salespeople often face. This is more than wearing down or tearing down something; it is building something in the buyer’s mind. You are building an image or reputation that induces others to buy.

One more time, you are battling for the customer’s mind as well as their business. The enemy is not the customer; the customer is the prize. You are battling competitors and narrow-minded, commodity thinking. The battleground is the customer’s mind. Customer messaging is prepping the battlefield for victory. Instead of bombs and missiles, you are firing messages of value.

THE PAIN PROPOSITION

The pain proposition plays a major role as part of your messaging. In Chapter 6, you read about loss aversion and opportunity cost. We made a strong case for pain as a more powerful motivator than gain. People hate to lose. Some hate a loss more than they desire a win.

Salespeople communicate product features and benefits. Then they demonstrate how their product solution leads to a gain in profit, time, or revenue. This is the value proposition, which is the downline, tangible outcome the buyer gains from experiencing your solution. What if the buyer is influenced more by pain than gain? How would that change your message?

Consciously or unconsciously, buyers make decisions to maximize gain and to avoid pain. Your messaging campaign should emphasize what the buyer gains and the pain he avoids. This type of customer messaging is compelling.

Pain and loss trigger different emotions than gain. For buyers to change, they need to stop what they are currently doing and start doing something new. Pain motivates people to stop what they are currently doing. Gain motivates them to start something new.

The pain proposition emphasizes what the buyer stands to lose by not experiencing your value-added solution. In Chapter 6, we called that opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is another way to view the consequences of inertia. There is a cost of doing something and a cost of doing nothing. Making buyers aware of the greater cost encourages them to change. The pain proposition emphasizes the cost of doing nothing, which could mean continuing down a path of destruction.

Everyone fears something more than paying too much for something. In customer messaging, a benign sense of fear makes the buyer aware of what would happen if the buyer chooses another alternative. What pain would she experience? The sense of a lost opportunity. The buyer could lose her competitive edge in the market or miss a valuable opportunity. Challenge yourself with the question, “What does the buyer miss by not partnering with us?” Embed that consequence in your messaging not as a threat but as a matter of fact.

If a buyer must pay 10 percent more for your solution, he may consider that 10 percent differential as a loss. Remember, losses loom larger than gains. What would happen if there was a greater loss of not moving forward with your solution? Loss aversion motivates buyers to tighten their grip on the resources they have. If the buyer is going to loosen his grip, you need to give him something greater to hold onto.

An effective technique for involving a benign sense of pain is asking the buyer questions that call attention to a potential pain point. For example, your solution might save the buyer on total cost. A question that focuses on her current cost would be a pain proposition. You could ask the buyer, “Do you really know what your current piece of equipment is costing you?” Asking a question that calls attention to a pain point will help the buyer gain perspective.

The pain proposition focuses the message on the buyer’s greater concerns. It balances the cost of change with tightening the grip of the status quo. For a buyer to change, there needs to be a combination of pain and gain. Pain is what he will miss, and gain is the outcome of your value. Invoking a sense of pain is not heavy-handed persuasion. It’s communicating the implications of doing nothing. You are presenting a fair argument for the buyer to consider.

VALUE-ADDED SELLING REVIEW AND ACTION POINTS

1.   Marketing is more than a department; it is every way you communicate with your customers. Customer messaging is the ongoing conversation you have with your customers as part of your marketing campaign. Salespeople execute tactically what marketing designs strategically. Your sales efforts must be consonant with your company’s marketing strategy.

2.   Conduct a value audit and study your value added. From this exercise, you can create a VIP list—a listing of all your value added. This is your first customer messaging tool. Other customer messaging tools you can create are an elevator speech, the customer bill of rights, which describes your customer experience; your USP, which is the stand-out difference that makes you outstanding in your market; and the value proposition, which is the outcome of the customer’s experiencing your value added and uniqueness.

3.   The one-sheet is a summary of the messaging tools we presented in this chapter. It answers the most important questions about the value of your solution.

4.   With your collaterals in hand and messages clear, your next task is to launch a campaign to surround the target market with your messages.

5.   The pain proposition makes the buyer aware of the opportunity cost of not going with your solution. You are not inventing the pain of loss; you are pointing it out.